responsibilities; would that you might realize them. You enjoy glorious
privileges; will you slight them? With the power, under God, of
relieving the sorrowful, enlightening the ignorant, elevating the
degraded, and diffusing a vital energy through every pore of this
suffering world, will you stand like some bleak Alpine cliff, breathing
perpetual frost, merely an object for the curious to gaze upon? so
live that your selfish heirs shall rejoice at your death, and the
judgment-day clothe you with eternal shame?

Do you say, "My money is my own; I may use it as I please?" Hark! God
thunders, "Thy gold and thy silver is mine." Will you trifle with
Jehovah's voice, and incur his righteous wrath? Hear the terrible
denunciations of James: "Go to, now, ye rich men, weep, and howl for
your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and
your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the
rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as
it were fire." Absorbed in the pursuits of gain, or whirling on your
glittering rounds of pleasure, you may heedlessly disregard the appeals
of distressed humanity, and proudly congratulate yourselves on your
exalted positions, your honors and flatteries; but, rely upon it, you
are only heaping "treasure together for the last day." Every call of
charity from which you turn coldly away will be a drop of anguish to
your undying soul. How trifling your gifts to the Lord, compared with
the vastly greater sacrifices of many far poorer than yourself, and
whom, perhaps, you now despise. When these shall shine forth as the sun
in the kingdom of their Father, where, O, where will you be found? O,
how will all that affluence in which you have garnered up your hopes
appear, when hearing the voice of your Final Judge, "Inasmuch as you did
it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me;"
and bereft of your treasures and your hopes together, you find the